Thursday, February 4. 2010

Ski the Olympics Downhill Course...From you computer, of course

Spot Image released an interactive 3D image video that allows the viewer to be taken down either the men's or women's downhill ski run at Whistler that will be used for the 2010 Winter Olympic games near Vancouver, Canada. It's worth seeing. According to Spot, "the 3D view was produced by draping a KOMPSAT-2 satellite image (South Korean satellite designed with support from EADS Astrium) over a grid indicating the elevations of each point. The 3D image thus obtained, at a resolution of 1 metre, is then inserted in�Google Earth Enterprise where users can visualize it interactively. This technology�depicts relief very accurately."

When will location-based services stop being fads and start getting real?

This week is Social Media Week in New York and Wed was a panel titled: The Future of Space and Time and it addressed that question. The answer: "conditioning larger audiences to share their real-time info and location will be necessary for such technologies to truly take off." There are some good comments from leaders in the industry in a review at Econsultancy.

- Econsultancy

Over at Connected Planet Danny Briere of TeleChoice thinks the answer is aggregation.

- Connected Planet

Check-in in Loopt for Haiti

Bottom line: check in at Chipotle, Whole Foods or Panera via Loopt and those businesses will give a dollar to the Red Cross for Haiti. US only, February 2nd - midnight Sunday February 7th

(Loopt has not had much buzz lately, eh?)

- press release

Foursquare Biz Model Analysis

An Ad Age article examines the plan for revenue generation. Best quote:

"But before it can do any of that [stuff to make money], Foursquare must prove it can expand beyond early adopters and educate marketers on how to use the service in ways its fickle users won't hate."

- Business Insider

NGAC Reps Announced

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has appointed 14 individuals to serve as members of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC).

They are:

Dr. Robert Austin, City of Tampa, FL
Ms. Sophia Beym, State of New Mexico
Mr. Michael Byrne, State of California
Dr. David Cowen, University of South Carolina
Mr. David DiSera, First Insurance Company of Hawaii
Ms. Kass Green, Kass Green & Associates
Hon. Randy Johnson, Hennepin County, Minnesota
Mr. Barney Krucoff, District of Columbia
Dr. Xavier Lopez, Oracle USA
Ms. Kimberly Nelson, Microsoft Corporation
Brigadier General Jack Pellicci, USA, Ret., Intergraph Corporation
Ms. Cynthia Salas, CenterPoint Energy
Mr. Eugene Schiller, Southwest Florida Water Management District
Mr. Steve Wallach, U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

- press release

Advertising Meets Remote Sensing

Either some people are just downright clever or have a lot of time on their hands. But there it was, a double-page spread advertisement for�Lexus in this week's Sports Illustrated magazine that utilized thumbnail-sized satellite imagery to spell the phrase "Further than they length of every paved road on the planet" to support how many miles Lexus hybrid automobiles have driven.

Each satellite image in the ad was cropped to show a road segment or other�land feature�depicting a letter of the alphabet. For example, using the image at right, you can see that it might be used for the letter "C" and so each word was spelled using a different satellite image.

The credits for the contributors to this ad read like a "who's who" of the geospatial data sector including the usual suspects such as GeoEye, Tele Atlas, DigitalGlobe, the USGS, Aerodata International, Spot, Map Data Sciences, Europa Technologies, and several others. And given this plethora of contributors, it is quite obvious that the imagery has an international flavor as well. So, indeed, someone spent a lot of time searching for that perfect image that had just the right configuration of terrain and man-made objects to spell success.